Future scenarios for post-recession America (poll)

Our economy is unsustainable. That means at some point in the future it will cease to be sustained. People will lose homes and jobs, and lifestyles will change. Sound familiar to our present day scenario? In my previous post I added a link to the Crash Course, a video series about the challenges America faces over the coming 10 years from our oil addiction: our generation gap of baby boomers retiring and not enough workers to pay for their retirement, our incredibly increasing debt, our lack of savings, and our exponential growth due to fossil fuel consumption resulting in a degrading supply of resources as well as destruction of the ecology we depend on for life. Peak Oil was another issue I brought up in a recent blog. All of these issues will bring about future scenarios that can play in multiple ways. (You can watch these videos from my post here.)

The context of this post will follow the future energy descent scenarios created by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture, as per his website Future Scenarios. These scenarios deal with the responses we can go forward with after the peak production of oil arises. Our country imports nearly 70% of its oil – how can our country continue this path of exponential growth if other countries deteriorate in oil exports?

Creative Loafing